[lldb-dev] LLDB Coding Style

[jingham at apple.com]

> On Aug 19, 2014, at 10:35 PM, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:
> On Aug 19, 2014, at 10:16 AM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> wrote:
> 
> > I brought this up in a thread on lldb-commits, but since it is of more general interest, I want to make a thread here as well.
> >
> > Can we have clear direction on LLDB coding style?
> 
> Just to toss out a controversial opinion here, I consider it a bug that LLDB doesn’t follow the documented LLVM coding standard.  This only drives a wedge between LLDB and the rest of the LLVM community.
> 
> I want to strongly, emphatically agree.
> 
> Coding standards are most valuable when consistent across a broad, shared body of code. We need more contributors in LLDB, and one place to get them is from the existing large pool of LLVM developers. We should be lowering the barriers there, especially for easy things like coding standards.

I've been poking my head a bit in llvm/clang recently, and although I much prefer the way we write code in lldb, and think some aspects of the way llvm is coded make it harder to understand than necessary, the fact that it had a different coding convention from lldb's was not a major barrier.  If you are going to be around in this business for any length of time you'll have to play in lots of other people's code, and follow the conventions you find there.  I guess I've never found that to be a really big deal.

I do agree that the lack of a clear coding standard for lldb does make it harder to submit patches confidently, and we should rectify that.  We actually talked about it ourselves when we started lldb, but we didn't write anything up because for a very long time we had no external contributors.

> 
> Also, as we are actively developing convention, standard, and formatting tools, the cost of changing this is going down and the value to the *existing* developers of using the common coding standard is going up.

Given that good formatting tools will be amenable to a variety of styles, this doesn't seem a very persuasive argument.  Provided there is a style file for any given coding convention, the presence of the tools is style neutral.

Jim


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